STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 749

Full transcript of an interview with

JEFF MINCHAM

on 20 September 2005

by Peter Donovan

for the

EMINENT AUSTRALIANS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library

OH 749 JEFF MINCHAM

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 749

Interview with Jeff Mincham conducted by Peter Donovan on 20th September 2005, for the Eminent Australians Oral History Project of the National Library and the State Library of South Australia.

DISK 1

Okay, this is tape 1 of an interview with Jeff Mincham. Jeff has followed a distinguished career as a potter and in the ceramics field, and he’s currently still very much alive, working in that field. Jeff will be speaking to me, Peter Donovan, for the Eminent Australians Oral History Project conducted by the National Library of Australia and the State Library of South Australia. So on behalf of the Director General of the National Library and the Director of the State Library of South Australia, I’d like to thank you for agreeing to participate in this program, Jeff.

Jeff, do you understand that copyright is shared by you and the libraries?

Yes, I do, Peter.

This being so, may we have your permission to make a transcript of this recording should the libraries decide to make one?

You may.

We hope you’ll speak as frankly as possible, knowing that neither the tapes nor the transcripts produced from them will be released without your authority. This interview is taking place today, Tuesday, 20th September, at Jeff Mincham’s home at Cherryville.

Now, Jeff, can we begin at the beginning: where you were born, when you were born and where you grew up?

Well, I was born in 1950 in Strathalbyn. My parents had a farm at nearby Milang and I was born in Strathalbyn, brought up in Milang and had my early childhood experiences in and around that area. I went to high school in Strathalbyn and eventually to Prince Alfred College, and had my primary school years in the Milang Primary School.

Now, we’ve skipped over that pretty quickly. Where do you fit in the family? Are you an only child, number of siblings, where do you fit?

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Eldest child of two, I have a brother two and a half years younger than me, and he lives in Victoria these days but until recently lived here in South Australia too.

And what did your parents do?

My mother and father were farming people. My father had grown up on a property at Echunga in the Adelaide Hills and moved to Milang in 1946 and I was born in 1950. It was initially a mixed farm; it became focused more and more on dairying. So I grew up in the bosom of a dairy farm, I suppose.

Did your mother work on the farm?

Yes, in the way of the farming life and in the way of that particular sort of farming everybody in the family makes a contribution at some stage. But it was a busy, active farm and everybody took an active role in making it function and financially survive.

Who do you take after, your mother or your father?

(laughs) Well, that’s interesting. The camp is divided on that opinion. I think I actually come to the conclusion that I probably do take mostly after my grandmother on my father’s side. I’ve noticed in the family histories and so forth that her nature and mine do seem to be somewhat similar. But my mother came from pretty solid Cornish stock and the Mincham side of the family are equally phlegmatic and Protestant (laughs) and so those two influences sort of are shared fairly equally in my nature, I think.

Well, you’re now an artist: was there any art in the family home? Was there music there, was there art, was there literature, reading?

No, there wasn’t. There was very little contact with that sort of thing. There were very few – you know, there were plaster ducks on the wall, not pictures. Other members of the Mincham family had some arts connection but I didn’t really come in contact with them until I was in my teenage years. The art, music, literature, it was pretty much in absence; it simply in a 1950s household in a farming community in South Australia was pretty much non-existent. And it came as an exhilarating surprise to me as it began to unfold in my teenage years.

So presumably not much encouraging of this talent, recognition of it at primary school?

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I did a few things. Occasionally my sort of ‘artistic’ nature would surface in a surprising way, and I was lucky in that I struck individuals along the way that encouraged it. In order for a boy, a teenager and a young man to survive in that kind of community you participate in, you embrace the mores of, that kind of lifestyle and community; and anyone that got very involved in the arts made themselves into an outsider. Now, I certainly had an interest in it, I showed a bit of a flair for theatre in my high school years, I struggled in the early secondary education and people began to notice that there was this sort of artistic ‘flair’, as it was referred to. I somewhat suppressed it, I suppose, in terms of it causing me problems in being able to stand up to the measuring stick of young manhood and youth that was very much apparent: you know, you had to kick a football and you had to run fast and you had to do hair- raising things. (laughs) And in a strange way the artistic side of my nature was satisfied by my early engagement with the study of natural history – ornithology, entomology and the local natural history – and this, in a somewhat curiously displaced way, gave me a great deal of personal satisfaction. That was eventually, I think, going to reinforce my activities as an artist, because it taught me to look at the world very closely, it taught me the powers of observation, it made you understand the forces of nature and the way things worked and were connected, and I was very carried away with that. I was much more interested in that than I was in anything that was going on at school.

Right. We’re now on this time there, Jeff. You’re at Prince Alfred: were you a boarder? Did you see your parents much?

Yes, I arrived at Prince Alfred College to do matriculation, and I actually boarded in the city and went to the College as a day boy. I stayed on for two years afterwards in the boarding college as a housemaster, so I had a three-year involvement there. It was a fantastic experience. I was, due to my father’s good judgment, given a marvellous opportunity, and the quality of the education was exceptional. I enjoyed every minute of it. It gave me a terrific step forward, a great lift up, in terms of my educational experiences and I went on from there to art school.

Were there any major people who moulded your career there, you would put down as major – – –?

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Well, there were two – in my artistic growth, there was a high school teacher called Helen Pannell that had a big influence on me when I was thirteen, fourteen. When I got to Prince Alfred College the art master was Malcolm Gray[?] and I was the first student to go through and matriculate in Art from Prince Alfred College and Malcolm put a lot of time and effort into getting me up to the standard, which I have always deeply appreciated, and again I learnt and gained a great deal, an enormous amount was packed into that year, and Malcolm was very, very supportive and generous and that made a very big difference to where I then went at art school.

Why go to art school and teachers’ college? Why not go back on the farm? What happened to the farm?

Ah, well. I had at one stage thought that I would go back on the land. I’d thought very seriously about going to Roseworthy Agricultural College and it looked like I was going to do down that path. I had a great interest in the land. But the very, very severe drought in 1967 – very big setback for farming communities – my father looked around him and said, ‘Look, there is simply no future on the land for you. Do whatever you can, but this farm won’t support you and your brother; you need to go out and carve out your own piece of ground in the world.’ And the certainty of things was somewhat disrupted by that, I was a bit lost for a while. I did have scholarships to go to the Institute of Technology1, as it was then known, or the opportunity existed to go into the art teaching stream. Now, in terms of how my family and that accepted what I wanted to do, they could understand me going to teachers’ college and training to be an art teacher; the idea of me going to art school and training to be an artist was just a bridge too far. (laughs) So I took the teachers’ college option and I was very enthusiastic about being an art teacher. It got me into the South Australian School of Art, albeit as what was then known as a ‘J’ student, and that was terrifically exciting. It turned out very well because I got a very mixed liberal studies-style, humanities- based, education. I got English, Politics, that sort of thing from the teaching stream, and then I got the Fine Art training, packed in together.

What sort of art, at this stage, intrigued you?

1 Subsequently amalgamated with teachers’ colleges to become the present University of South Australia.

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It was most definitely painting. I had shown in my teenage years an ability to successfully render native birds (laughs) and watercolour paintings of birds, and people came to know them quite well. Well, based on the strength of that I thought painting was the thing. (laughs) Then I met Post-Modernism. That was a shock. It wasn’t until, really, my second year at art school that I came in contact with ceramics. So initially I trained as a painter. I immediately did very well, I duxed my year in the first year, and I really did think that painting was the pathway I was going down. And then, somewhat out of left field, appeared ceramics.

Well, how did that happen? It sounds almost like a St Paul’s conversion!

It was a fall on the Road to Damascus, yes. (laughs) I was walking past the Sculpture Department one day and there was a huge crowd of people in there, and that was surprising. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ So I went in and looked over people’s shoulders, and there was a demonstration taking place by a very famous English potter called Harry Davis. Harry was visiting South Australia then going on to New Zealand, and he died many years later in Peru. He was one of the pioneer group of English potters that came on the scene in the ’40s and ’50s, inspired by Bernard Leech, and he’d worked in Africa; he’d had a huge amount of experience in the old English potteries; and he and his wife, May Davis, had carved out a very pragmatic potting philosophy. I saw him demonstrating and it immediately attracted me. It was the sort of thing a farming boy could understand, you know, the fierce pragmatics of it was more than obviously apparent. The command of the material, the grace and ease with which Harry handled it, it just absolutely carried me away and I was done for, right there and then! (laughs)

So what did you do? How did you change your scope? Was it easy to go from one discipline to the other?

Well, it was, relatively. I sort of went back and decided that I’d pick up some units in Ceramics, and I went to the library and got out every book I could find on it and took them home and got very, very enthusiastic. The access that I could get to it was a bit limited, so I started in an old cellar down at my parents’ farm, I started potting, bringing home bags of clay and buying tools – all of them quite useless, I’ve still got some of them – and set to work making things. And it just excited me, absolutely genuinely excited me. So then I got to the stage where I set up a small pottery in an

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old dairy that wasn’t functioning on the farm any more and built a couple of rather hair-raising kilns. And I had contact with a Danish potter that was then actually living here in Cherryville called Annalisa Jans. They were visiting from Denmark and they’d set up a small pottery to make some money while they were here, and Annelise had been trained on a continental kick-wheel in very much the European style. I had my very first experiences on the potter’s wheel in connection to Annelise. The continental kick-wheel is not an easy way to begin throwing. I did master it, slowly, and it stood me in good stead actually for the rest of my potting life. The next year I was able to take it as a major study at art school, and because I’d done the sort of preliminary work I was into it very quickly and I did manage to pack more into the space of one year than was usual. It was you did it over three years: well, I managed to pack it all into one.

So Milton Moon was your teacher at this stage?

Initially he had a loose relationship, I suppose, with the teacher trainee students. But you were offered a fourth year on a competitive basis – you had to have the marks to do it – and you could take up a particular subject on an absolutely full-time basis and it was Sculpture or Painting or Printmaking or Ceramics. Milton had carved out a very substantial reputation for himself and appeared to me like a kind of a demigod. It looked like the thing I desperately wanted to do so I got the marks and I got into the course, and I had one very full-on, flat-out year as a student in the Ceramics Department run by Milton Moon.

What sort of impression did that leave you on? You said it was full-on: what did it embrace?

Well, Milton had surrounded himself with a group of very interesting students, very enthusiastic group of students, and the Ceramics Department ran flat-out, full-bore, all day, as many days as we could get in there. They had to throw us out at nine o’clock at night and we were rolling up at eight-thirty or earlier in the morning to run kilns and all sorts of things. And we managed kilns by sleeping there overnight, for heaven’s sakes. The discipline of the potting world was very apparent. You were very much encouraged to put your head down and learn to throw very well. Milton had learned from Merv Feeney in Queensland where he’d had his initial potting experiences, a very good throwing technique which we were taught. It meant hours

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at the wheel, though, to really get a level of mastery of it. We built kilns and did all these sort of crazy things and got some – well, we thought they were pretty good results, but (laughs) perhaps looking back on it they weren’t – but if you were prepared to work, the way things ran you got the support you needed to do it. So you could, if you really wanted to get at it, the opportunity was there.

So what did you get from Milton?

Milton had a very vital approach to the medium, to the clay. The clay was king. He wasn’t so much about controlling it, or he certainly wasn’t very interested in industrial-type production – we had a lot of industrial-type equipment in the Department that wasn’t much used. He was very absorbed by the Leech–Cardew potting style and approach, the contact that he was having at that time with Japanese potting philosophies, so that brought the issue of the Japanese aesthetic ideologies into the spectrum. It was simply built around an idea that you needed to work very hard and develop a totally intuitive relationship with the material. It was a truth-to- material type approach, and it came through in lots of ways. I worked in a sculptural sense as well and made quite a few sculptural works during that time, as the other students did as well, but it was a blood-and-guts, get- stuck-into-the-clay type approach.

How many colleagues did you have doing the course, and – very quickly – how many would still be working in clay?

I guess there were about fifteen, sixteen students that came through and graduated in that period. There are three of us left now, still working full-time and flat-out, and that would be myself and Liz Williams and perhaps Alison Cooper. Most of the others fell by the wayside – some soon, some lasted a few years – and others moved on from ceramics over the years. There were only one or two others in the teaching stream that were involved in ceramics, and I seem to be the only one of that group that survived. Interestingly enough, quite a number of prominent South Australian practising artists these days came through that same program of having the teacher training structure and the art school both together at the same time. It was very demanding. It was impossibly demanding at times, you just didn’t know where you were meant to be. But by gosh it certainly produced its share of successful practitioners.

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So soon thereafter you did post-graduate studies in Tasmania.

I was very lucky, in that – – –.

How could you do that – presumably you were bonded to the Education Department?

Well, I was, and I was excused from that for a year because I was given an opportunity to go and work with Les Blakeborough at the Tasmanian School of Art. It was a one-year kind of postgraduate study, and it was funded by the Crafts Board of the Australia Council. Now, this organization came on the scene in 1971 and I received a grant in the second round of grants given by the Crafts Board and I got a $2,000 grant to go and study for one year with Les Blakeborough at the Tasmanian School of Art. And that was – well, an amazing experience because when I got there there really wasn’t a department. There was a building and there was a pile of materials and a heap of equipment under canvas, but the Department was not really properly functioning. So myself and some of the other students that Les gathered around him and his assistant Patrick Collins and I all got to work and got this department up and running and going. It was a terrific experience because ninety per cent of the clay used in the Department was made by us; the glazes were prepared from local minerals and materials; we learnt the business of formulating high- temperature glazes from ash and rock, and the art of the bore mill and the filter press and the pug mill; and it was pretty damned industrial. Les had an immensely different disciplined approach, it was absolutely and totally different from Milton Moon: his idea of command of the medium was absolute control of it. He got on top of the science, he got on top of the production methodology, the equipment ran. We over that year built up a very successfully ticking and humming ceramics workshop that had quite a large number of students going through it, I think nearly thirty-odd students in different programs going through it, and we built that department up around the students and made it run and used mostly local materials.

Why did you go to Tasmania and Les Blakeborough? Were there no other – – –?

There wasn’t much else on offer. This was the days before degrees and masters’ and doctorates and so forth, I mean everything was just diplomas. There was nowhere you could do a degree in Fine Art in South Australia, there were only diplomas. The idea of postgraduate studies hadn’t been developed very much, it was a bit of an

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experiment in that sense. Les Blakeborough came to Milton looking for a couple of people that could go down there and work with him and Milton recommended me, and that’s how that particular door opened. Les had worked previously at the Sturt Workshops at Mittagong, part of the Frencham Girls’ School, Winifred West School, and built up a very big and successful operation there. There’d been some uncomfortable politics and he decided that he’d go out of the production studio that he’d built into the academic world of the art school. That art school was trying to attract interesting and talented people from all over Australia, and Les went down there on invitation and started the program, started building the department up, and that was how I came into the business of working with Les.

So how many other students were there? How much did you get from him, how much working with other students? How much experimentation did you do?

Well, we did a great deal of experimentation in the area of rock glazes, using local materials, understanding the local geology and mineralogy, developing local clays, really – you know, using ash glazes, firing and building kilns, getting them to work successfully. Oh, we got a heck of a lot of that. There were three or four principal students, I think there was – well, there was Patrick Collins, Les’s assistant, Peter Davis and myself that were really the main players in running the Department. The students that came in, they’d been all put on hold while the Department got up and got going, and they were collected from a group of old night and part-time courses. It was really the year after I left, that department absolutely flourished over the next few years and a lot of interesting students passed through it in that time, but I was there in really the ground-up, building phase, I’d have to say.

And what did you take from the Department that stood you in good stead?

What I got from it was how to make a studio work. What I got was the fierce discipline of the hard pragmatics of the potter’s life: how to get your reliable results, how to get a kiln to temperature. (laughs) You learnt the ebb and flow of the potting life, the discipline that was required to produce results. You learnt the demands of a production studio, of the timing, of getting things done at the right time in the right place. That’s what I gained from it, it stood me in very good stead when I started work.

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How would you regard yourself at this stage: as a potter or an artist, or is there much of a distinction? At this stage in your life?

Well, I would regard myself as an artist now. I use the word ‘potter’ in my own way, but I think I have come through the potting world in a certain kind of a way. I had always an instinct to approach it as an art form, and now I operate within the sort of, shall we say, the potter’s genre; but the principal, driving motivation of my work now is artistic, it’s the aesthetic outcome.

When I said ‘now’, I’m talking in Tasmania, in terms of that – – –.

No, I came out of Tasmania really committed to the production potter’s life. I was going to set up a studio as soon as I could if I could find a way to do it, and I was going to produce domestic ceramics, utilitarian ceramics. I was probably quite excited about the prospects of getting on top of all that. And I did go down that path for a time.

You still had a bond to the Education Department.

Yes, I had to come back to South Australia and I took up – I was given a teaching position at Croydon High School, which was a pretty frightening experience as it turned out. My secondary school experiences had not prepared me for the kind of difficulties that I confronted in that school. It was a very tough, urban school with a large number of problem students – seriously problematic students, that had come from local remand homes and so forth – and it was tough, it was the blackboard jungle. It was more of a brawl. (laughs) And I found my way through it, I had a bit of rough country upbringing and I managed to sort of get through it, but I did not want to go on with that. The opportunity existed for me to go to the Jam Factory and rent a space and start potting, and the bond system, the government had discovered that they’d bonded far too many students they had to provide jobs for, and decided that they were going to give up on this thing because if they had to hand out all these jobs they simply couldn’t afford it. So the bond system was slowly dissolved and I was released from my obligation a couple of years before I would normally have been. So I grabbed the opportunity with both hands and rushed off to the Jam Factory, bought a second-hand wheel, got a heap of slightly dodgy equipment and a few bags of clay and a couple of benches, and got started. Producing domestic ceramics.

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So where were you living at this stage?

Well, at about that stage I discovered Cherryville, and I’d known about it and then I found a house up here to rent and this is the house we’re sitting in. I loved this place, it was very close to the city, it was a beautiful and interesting place to live. In those days it was a very closed community, there were very few outsiders. The old families here went to Adelaide twice a year, once for the Royal Show and once if Port was playing in the Grand Final; otherwise they never went near the place. (laughs) And it was what I understood. Living in the city in a house in Norwood, flatting in Norwood with a group of other students: nah, wasn’t going to happen for me. The delights of Cherryville. And it was the 1970s, you know, it was this idea of going out there into the bush, sort of thing, and building your own rude timber home, it was that sort of fantasy, and I just loved the whole idea of it. So I acquired this property in August 1977, I’ve lived here ever since. I can’t imagine ever parting with it, I’d never be able to get it back. The place has grown more on me and around me in that thirty years-odd: I understand it, it understands me. (laughs)

So how did you develop during your time at the Jam Factory? Because you later went on to Murray Park and then the School of Design.

Yes. The Jam Factory was in its formative years and it was very exciting stuff. Things were ripping along, all sorts of interesting things were happening, all sorts of interesting people were appearing. It wasn’t terribly well thought through and, with all due respect to certain individuals who would take some umbrage at this, it was a badly-planned sort of – – –. It was a great idea, badly planned. But it was nevertheless hugely rewarding for the people that were there. The contact we had with like minds, the opportunities we had to get to work and there was a shop out the front, you could meet your public and you could develop a market: it was a very exciting time. The conditions were abysmal, the equipment was dreadful, (laughs) but we lived and worked in and around it and we had a hell of a lot of fun.

So what was the role of foreman at the Jam Factory?

Well, that came along – then they decided they wanted to set the Ceramics Department up as a training workshop in the same style as the others that were there. They brought in an American chap called Wally Schwall from California and he was going to run the Department. Wally found it pretty difficult to translate from

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America to Australia, and I was appointed as his leading hand or foreman or whatever, gopher, to help him get this department established. I had this reputation of having done it with Les and I came quite well-recommended in that sense, so they thought I would be ideal to help Wally get the Department up and running as a training workshop. What I found myself doing was holding a whole lot of things together and my own work was just getting forgotten. I was basically a technician and I was trying to run around and make this thing function and build kilns and all that kind of thing, and what I was doing as a potter was falling away. Now, that wasn’t the whole idea. So after a time I got very uneasy about this and I decided that, ‘Bugger it all! I came here to be a potter and I’m turning out to be more as a servant of the institution. I’m going to go home and set myself up at Cherryville.’ I’d acquired the Cherryville property by this stage, Lexie and I had, and there was an old shed up there and I bravely figured I could build myself a kiln up there and get on with it. (laughs) And I did, amazingly. So home I came, I built a kiln out of iron bedsteads and other people’s bricks, it was to be fired with sump oil – cross-draught, louvre-burner, sump-oil kiln, damn near ballistic – and to be a salt-glaze kiln. It cost me nothing – $130 to build and nothing to fire, because I got the sump oil for nothing. The louvre burners required considerable skill to handle. It was a natural-draught kiln which in potters’ language means a very finely-balanced judgment about what’s going in and what’s coming out, and I fired in salt-glaze which meant introducing raw salt to the kiln at significant times towards the end of the firing. And I gradually got some fabulous results out of that kiln. And for two years I fired every ten days – oh, I had a ripper of a time with it. In 1978, in the midst of all the smoke and drama of being an absolute blood-and- guts of being a peasant potter in the Adelaide Hills with his salt kiln, along came a gallery director from Sydney, Lynne[?] Smith, Lynne and Derek Smith. Her husband, Derek, was quite a famous Sydney potter in a thing called Blackfriars Pottery, a famous production pottery in Newtown. Lynne came up and visited the studio and asked me if I’d like to have an exhibition of my work with her in the Blackfriars Gallery, 172 St Johns Road, the Glebe. Well! ‘Exhibition in Sydney – whacko, here I go!’ So I threw myself into that and the first show I had up there was of salt glaze ceramics in November 1978.

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However, I had had a previous exhibition experience at the Jam Factory: I’d been asked to put an exhibition on due to an unexpected gap in the calendar in 1976, so my first full-scale exhibition was in October 1976. So I was off on the exhibition trail, and I guess I, in those sort of formative years, started to develop my work around that scenario, I started to cater for it. And by that I mean spotting the spectacular one-off, the exhibition-standard piece. I got more focused on that and less focused on the production ones, and the idea of making cups and mugs forever lost its appeal; but the idea of that spectacular, gorgeous blush of colour and salt and flash of copper red up one side from the copper sulphate went in the kiln and the few lovely black drips from the roof, that very much spoke to me in terms of the Japanese aesthetic that I’d been exposed to first with Milton but then in a different way and very powerfully with Les Blakeborough. And this aesthetic of the process has stayed with me all this time. At about that time I started to work in raku as well, which I had a bit of experience with as a student – most students do – pretty messy and pretty hopeless. But I was asked to come along and demonstrate raku at a weekend workshop down at Goolwa of the South Australian Studio Potters. Again, because I was all of twenty-eight years of age, I had very little experience with raku, a little bit. Someone was meant to come from overseas, they didn’t show up and someone said, (laughs) ‘Oh, get Jeff Mincham, he can do anything.’ And so I kind of brought myself up to pace on it, shot down there, and I don’t know how much the students got out of it but I got a heck of a lot out of it. The possibilities of it opened up in front of me very quickly. And I can remember having a lovely chat with a very famous South Australian, an underrated South Australian sculptor, Margaret Sinclair who, in a very kindly, motherly kind of way, encouraged me and said, ‘You know, you should do more of this approach and I can see that you get a kick out of it and so forth, and you could perhaps develop your work.’ And we had a couple of very nice talks about it and she sowed a seed that restlessly worked away in my mind for some time. And I came back from that experience with raku on my mind. And raku was just as dangerous as salt glazing so that was another reason for its appeal, so I came home and started producing raku work, which again met with instant exhibition success.

Just going back a step, you mentioned Lexie there earlier, so you were married by this stage?

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The best thing to come out of Croydon High School in my experience was meeting Lexie. Lexie Barber, as she then was, was a teacher in English as a Second Language at Croydon High School in the Language Department. And Lexie and I were roughly the same age and had come from roughly similar backgrounds. She had come from a farm in Queensland on the Darling Downs at Dolby or Macallister, little town of Macallister, and grown up and gone to high school in Dolby like I’d gone to high school in Strathalbyn, and we’d very similar backgrounds. And in the strange place that Croydon High School was we found we had a lot in common, and fell in love and got married. It didn’t take long, six months. (laughs) And she was all on for this crazy adventure that I seemed to be set on and she did nothing but encourage me. (laughs) And I don’t know whether she regrets it or not, I never asked! However.

Has she been involved? Does she inspire you to various things, or is she a critic?

Oh yes, I mean the whole approach was she was pretty excited about the whole ceramics world, although she stayed in the teaching world, and she was very – I don’t know: she may have had a hankering to take up ceramics herself, I think she might have, but somehow or other that sort of never happened. She was a very, very good teacher and very devoted to her students. She became the head of a language centre here in Gilles Street in Adelaide and she was very, very popular, very highly thought of – I mean, she meets students now, twenty-five years later, that still absolutely adore her – and she made a big difference to their lives. And she was a very good and gifted teacher at languages. So I think for other people’s sake it’s just as well she didn’t join me in the studio. But I think she could see that I was, by my nature, I was fond of solo flight. (laughs) I was irrepressibly individualistic in my approach. And rather ruggedly individualistic, I suppose.

So I’ve got down here you became a lecturer in Ceramics at Murray Park College –

Yes.

– and then School of Design. You were doing this – – –?

Well, that came along, a teaching contract came there to replace a chap called Graham Gunn, who was away on long service leave for six months. So I went down there to the then Murray Park and I had a great friend there that still lives at

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Summertown, Colin Burchett, who had a great influence on me. Colin was and still is one of the most naturally-gifted craftsmen I’ve ever known. He had a spectacular ability with anything, with wood, with metal, with clay – there was just nothing he couldn’t turn his hand to and he was an inspiring individual, was Colin. I went down there to that Ceramics Department and taught and had a bit of a sample of teaching in the art school system. I had only part-time teaching then at the School of Design at Torrens College of Advanced Education – the whole place seemed to be changing its name about every six months – and the old School of Art was about to up stumps and move off down to Underdale. So at the end of that period at Stanley Street, really the end of the glorious days of Stanley Street, I had a part-time teaching job there as well. Those jobs were quite well-paid in those days. I was awfully young to be teaching anybody, but enthusiasm got you by. I’d been exposed in my learning years to very good potters that they were the best and they wanted you to be the best, and you took great pride in your capacity to do things and you honed your skills down, so probably you were a fairly effective teacher, even though you weren’t very old. But it was a semi- kind of tutorial–lecturing type position. And I continued to develop my throwing skills and my capacity to impart them to others. I got very adept, as the years would unfold, at the business of throwing and teaching others how to do it, throwing on the potter’s wheel.

So at this stage you presumably haven’t travelled overseas: all your experience has been gained from people in Australia?

Yes. Eclectic, but nevertheless all really contained in Adelaide and Tasmania. Hadn’t been overseas at all. A couple of interesting things happened at around about that time. I got involved with the Crafts Association of South Australia, and (laughs) by one means or another ended up in the sort of crafts administrative world, and I ended up being President of the Crafts Association of South Australia. God almighty! What it did do was get me up to Sydney to the Crafts Council of Australia, and this has proved to be a mightily-important thing for me because, at twenty-eight or twenty-nine years of age, the whole national world of the crafts and the arts opened up in front of me. I went up to Sydney to meetings two or three times a year, thrilled at getting on an Ansett aeroplane and flying up to Sydney – my God, you’d think you’d really arrived! And in the fashion of the day I was wearing – South Australia

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used to like, very fond of – you know, this was the Dunstan Era2 of safari suits and I can remember the stark reality of being stunningly out of tune with fashion by flying up to Sydney in a safari suit, you know, (laughs) and people would say, ‘You’re from South Australia.’ But the national world opened up in front of me and I right from that early time combined exhibiting with Blackfriars Gallery, operated on a national basis, set myself at showing my work in all of Australia’s capital cities, of operating on an Australia-wide basis, and that has got me through. If I hadn’t, those South Australians that didn’t go onto the national stage didn’t survive, simple as that. All of us that have managed to come right up to the year 2005 have done so by frequently exhibiting interstate and overseas. The next dimension was overseas. Now, that didn’t occur for me until I entered my work in an award in New Zealand in 1985, Fletcher Challenge Award, got a phone call saying I’d won it and they wanted to fly me over to collect the prize. I didn’t even have a passport, I had no idea how to get a passport and I had three days to get there. Well, anyway, I did get the passport and off I went and had my first experience of an international flight, and that set me off. Quickly following in the next five years were several trips to America, and I’ve continued to have a strong international component in my practice.

Let’s get on to the practice, the independent practice rather than the teaching, but I gather you continue teaching at the moment from time to time. I guess one of the questions you’ve half-answered: how you have survived as an independent artist.

Yes.

Because you need to have a business sense, you’ve got to get material to an exhibition, you’ve got to get insurance, you’ve got to get carriers, it’s a pretty complex thing.

Well, I guess I wasn’t – apart from the fact that my growing up years and my family background had given me an innate pragmatism. In March 1979 I applied for a job to run the Ceramics Department at the Jam Factory. For about the third time it had collapsed in a heap and they were hunting around for someone that would take it on. I don’t think anybody wanted this job, which is why I got it, and I was set the task of

2 Don Dunstan, then Premier of South Australia, was renowned for wearing safari suits rather than the more orthodox business suits favoured by his parliamentary colleagues.

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designing, building and setting in operation a production training workshop for studio potters – that was the phrase we used at the time, ‘studio potters’. So off I went. Well, that was a godforsaken shambles and I had to go in there and virtually tidy up the wreckage and build a workshop. There was no proper equipment, there were no trainees, it was a bloody mess. And if I had some practical skills, well, this was going to find them, and I had to get this thing to work. So I started buying the equipment and taking on a group of people and we painted the walls and put the glass back in the windows and got the kilns to work and fixed it up and got it running. And you had to be fiercely practical to make this thing happen. And I was utterly determined that, after all the scandal that had enveloped the Jam Factory on a regular occasion – goddammit, still does – it had had some very bad press, but here I was, twenty-nine years of age, and I was going to make this bloody thing work no matter what. So I did. And I had to go through all the business of ordering equipment and maintaining the stock books and getting a production line up, of taking on board a whole range of individuals. It was exciting, it was grippingly demanding. My own work kind of got pushed into the background for a while; I determinedly stuck to it. I thought the best example that I could set people coming in to the workshop was that I was a successful practitioner and not just an administrative lackey. I had to live with the Jam Factory’s unusual management structure, I had to deal with the board, I had to deal with the building up of the Jam Factory’s policy; I got a very rough introduction to the political processes that exist in the art world; and through my involvement with the Crafts Council network I got a bit of a refinement of that understanding, too. So there were these forces at work on me that were shaping me as I was going along. I lasted at the Jam Factory four and a half years, and at that stage I was pretty knocked up and burnt out, the demands of it emotionally and mentally. It hadn’t – that sort of thing, although I’d taken it on, really at that stage of my life wasn’t really in my nature. But it had to be, and I had to do things to survive. I don’t know who shaped who, whether I shaped it or it shaped me, but I did manage to create a department that survived and went on for many years afterwards. I did manage to – I had thirteen-odd people that went through with me, and pretty much all of those people, seven or eight of them, are now still very prominent and successful practitioners – not many in South Australia, but they’ve moved off to the world – and

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some of them became quite famous and had long potting lives. So that was an exciting time. At the end of it, in a somewhat burned-out state, I retreated to Cherryville, (laughs) back into my studio, and returned to the program of producing a body of work and exhibiting it. I’d pretty much despatched production pottery at this stage: the idea of utilitarian ceramics – which was very strongly promoted; they used to talk about ‘conceptual potters’ and ‘production potters’, it was ludicrous – – –. But the ‘conceptual’, at that time in Australia, were greatly influenced by the American Funk Movement. The echo of Funk had rung all the way from California to Adelaide and a group of artists, unusual group of artists, in Adelaide had picked up on it. I could see that, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t even dabble with it. And I looked at the production potters that set up their studios and got their kilns going and employed people and pushed through the coffee mug – they could make thirty an hour, eighty finished in two days, you know, that was – well, bugger that, you know. (laughs) And I set myself very much on an individualistic path of making individual work that satisfied my artistic impulses. Humbly to begin with and then, as I had more and more success, I extended it. The seed of Japanese aesthetic ceramic ideas that had been put in my mind in my early twenties continued to grow, and whenever I felt lost I could find a resonance of understanding there. I would keep going back there, I would understand it more and better and it still unfolds with unusual and surprising things to this very day. I mean, in the last few months even there’s been some things occur of that nature. So the clay – look, I can put this very simply – was a great adventure. I grew up in a climate as a young man, a boy and a teenager, where you were meant to have adventures, you were meant to go out and do impossible and hair-raising tasks, the more hair-raising and the more impossible, the more important it was to do it. And the adventure of clay, the excitement of it, the thrill of it, of getting on top of the thing, of getting results out of kilns, of the long vigils for results, of climbing over the technical problems, the demands of it – – –. And of course ceramics comes with its own arcane language, you know. We potters can talk to each other for half an hour and you outsiders would not know what the heck we said to each other. (laughs) It was a kind of robust freemasonry of clay. And God, I absolutely loved it. I damn well still do.

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And I had success in I won prizes. The work that I started to do in raku really shook the ceramic world in Australia, so I hadn’t gone down the conceptual Funk pathway, hadn’t gone down the production path; I’d gone down this other path and it was very well-received. It succeeded in exhibitions, had knockout, sell-out exhibitions. On my thirty-fifth birthday I opened on the 26th February 1985, my daughter had been born eight days before, there I was with a sell-out exhibition in Realities Gallery in Melbourne. My God, I was absolutely on top of it. These were the days when people used to bring their invitations along and you signed them as autographs, and for some years I enjoyed the status of being a kind of ceramic pop star! (laughs) There were a few others like it, that flew around Australia and attended conferences and did master classes and got very good at demonstrating to audiences that had their breath taking away by the speed and skill with which we could handle our material, and oh, God, it was a heck of a game. (laughs) Dear, oh dear, I’m still doing it.

END OF DISK 1: DISK 2

This is tape 2, Peter Donovan speaking with potter, Jeff Mincham, at his home at Cherryville on Tuesday, 20th September 2005.

Now, Jeff, on the last tape, just as we finished, you spoke of this as a ‘game’. There are all sorts of implications there. Did you approach it as part of a game?

Well, I was being slightly flippant saying that. I mean, you’ve got to rationalise things that occur. In the exhibition world it can look like a game, you know, (laughs) it can look like ‘us’ and ‘them’. At that stage that I was talking about before, early 1980s and so forth, I belonged to a group that had taken up the cause of a thing that was funded by the federal government through the Australia Council, called ‘Crafts as a Livelihood’, and we believed in the crafts as a livelihood. We believed that we were going to go down our whole working lives as a maker of things. And people did this is metal, they did it in fibre and wood and ceramics and eventually glass, and there was a group of us that were very, very committed to the notion of going out there and making our living for our whole life from our craft. We prided ourselves in our professionalism, we thought of ourselves as being very committed professionals, and we were pretty hard-edged about it all. We were somewhat despising of people that had a lower level of interest, the ‘amateur’ and the ‘hobbyist’, you know. We

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scorned them. We were very, very committed; very, very determined about it; somewhat deprecating of those that didn’t have the same level of commitment; and we drove ourselves like maniacs (laughs) to prove our point. But the business of having exhibitions and engaging with the public and the art critic and the gallery director, and the business of the politics of the art world, the publishing world, of getting your images in front of people, sometimes you’ve just got to step back from it a bit and regard it, regard yourself as playing a game. You’re a component in all this and your success is based on your ability to deal with the other components. So yeah, it’s a game. (laughs)

So exhibitions, presumably, are driven by your own expression and artistic wishes. Were you also driven in some instances, or helped, by commissions?

I have had quite a number of significant commissions that have been very helpful. And they financially do return very well. The trouble with the commission – – –. What an exhibition is about, as you suggested, it’s about self-expression – which is why they’re so bloody nerve-wracking – and the more you do the harder they get, it never gets any easier, because you’re putting your ideas in front of people in the expectation of a good response. Doesn’t always happen. But it is a self-motivated process of self-expression. Commissions are different: commissions, you’re working for a committee; you are attuning to others’ ideas – whether that be a group of people that have come together to get a particular thing made or done, an architect or a designer that is working on the project – and you’ve got to fit into this, you’re a component in a bigger project. So the opportunity for self-expression is somewhat reduced and can sometimes produce a bit of a crisis. I’ve proved to be able to adapt and be adaptable to it. I haven’t – in recent years I’ve tended to go back into my own self-expressive mode. The commission pathway was there, I did quite a few in various places around Australia, but then I gradually returned, I suppose, to the more self-expressive formula that I felt more comfortable with.

How has your life as an independent artist changed over time? You said some little while ago – might have been our earlier meeting – that it took a nosedive there or a downturn some time ago.

Yes. Well, after all the razzamatazz of the ’80s and early ’90s – and, you know, I was having exhibitions in America and zipping around all over the place: I was invited to England, to Aberystwyth, a famous potters’ festival, in 1991; I went in

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1994 to teach in Hawaii, and it was all pretty exciting. The signs of the cracks started to appear with the advent of the recession that occurred in the early ’90s. The galleries started closing. The high-profile, discretionary spenders disappeared. One gallery after another shut its doors, some owing me money – some which I would never retrieve. The American scene changed drastically at that time, it became incredibly difficult for me to sustain myself there, so I kind of pulled back with slightly burnt fingers from that experience. The American system, you understand, is agents that operate – they have a gallery system like ours as well, but they have sort of artist agents – and I’d had a pretty rough time with that lot. And then, as the ’90s developed, ceramics dropped off the scene, fast. There were less and less opportunities to show in good quality galleries, glass was ascending and ceramics was declining. The whole Crafts Movement around Australia entered a period of decline. It affected all of us, it wasn’t medium-based. Ceramics had been, I guess in the ’70s and ’80s, the strongest force in the Crafts Movement. Crafts organizations were made up of sort of forty, fifty per cent potters and then the others, the ceramics people – and they did have a lot to do with organizations because the fierce pragmatism that shaped them in their studio was actually also useful in running organizations, so that tended to happen. Well, that stopped. All over Australia the amateur potters started to stop, the marketplace started to collapse. There were permanent shifts in the economic sub-structure of communities, and I still believe to this day that things like the pokies, poker machines, in a place like South Australia drastically changed the economic sub-structures that underpin certain other things in a stepped and progressive way so that the discretionary dollar was disappearing from the economy, which the arts world rather depended upon. This left you with the arts, with the only hope of survival was down to getting support from the federal government or the state government through the various grants programs. And at the life-and-death edge of it all, about how on earth would I ever keep going, I got an Australia Council Fellowship in 1992 and it absolutely saved me. It was $30,000 and it gave me a year to get on with things. I put forward a program and got the grant and got on with it. But it gave me enough financial support to carry me through the next few years. I managed to get more than one year out of it, you know: I screwed it out for maybe the best part of three years in the end.

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And that – well, it certainly kept me afloat when I saw others struggling terribly. But from ’95 on towards 2000 was a very, very tough time. I was at an interesting stage in my work where I tell people I’d become the prisoner of my work: I’d become so identified with a particular style and a particular approach, a particular form, that it was dictating to me rather than me back to it. My artistic growth had kind of stalled. I’d developed some fabulous technical processes that had taken raku to another level altogether and I’d gone up in scale to where no- one had ever been before, but the ideas weren’t coming. I was developing a kind of writer’s block. I had things I knew I could do, day in and day out, and they were going to be very well-received; and I was still pulling some spectacular work out of that kiln; but the artistic growth had basically stalled and it held in that pattern for quite a while. I went, in 1996 I had the opportunity to go and teach at the Glasgow School of Art, which was so exciting, and off I went and entered their Ceramics Department and took over from the Head, Archie McCall, who came here to Canberra, and had the terrific experience of teaching fifteen young Glaswegians, none of whom I could ever understand, to use the potter’s wheel and to fire raku pots and all that sort of thing. I had a fantastic time there. I also had three days off each week to hire a car and rip off across the landscape, up the great glen to the top and turn right, (laughs) you know, and I drove all over Scotland, and Lexie and Claire came with me and we had a fabulous time exploring Scotland. They were there for half the time and the last half I got a bit of extra teaching up at Edinburgh, so I lived in the middle of a cosmopolitan city and caught a train up to Edinburgh and taught and caught a train back, and it was a very novel experience for me: I’d never ever lived like that, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The interesting effect that it had on my work was that was where one thing ended and another began. The Scottish landscape really got into my head and I came back home and very quickly stepped into a new, a completely new dimension in my work. It was for many people a rather shocking change – ‘Oh gosh, your work’s changed,’ you know – when in fact it had been changing for a while but they just noticed it for the first time. I’d had a couple of techniques which I’d been honing down for a while and I suddenly got them to work very well. When I got back from Scotland it kind of was a sea change kind of thing, you know. It was an opportunity for me to put one

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thing behind me and address another that had been simmering away there. So there was a change in form and style. Over the next couple of years I stopped throwing, and I’d been so aggressive about my throwing ability and so proud of my accomplishments on the potter’s wheel. I just stopped it. I left it in Scotland with fifteen Glaswegians. And started hand-building, because I just couldn’t get, in the thrown forms, the kind of qualities that I felt I needed because I’d figured this thing out about the landscape. The landscape came back into my work – it had always been there, there was maybe a two or three-year period where it wasn’t very apparent, but it had always been simmering away and I’d constantly gone back to the landscape for information, for support. And looking at the Scottish landscape, and suddenly I saw the Australian landscape differently. I stopped seeing it in the clichéd way; the complexity of the drama and the moodiness of the Scottish landscape, I started to see that here instead of red earth and ..... blue sky. I thought, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s a lot more going on out there.’ And I started to try and capture that in my work and I had early success. And that sudden, dramatic change gave me new legs in the exhibition game. Suddenly I was knocking off prizes again and work was being acquired in the public collections again, and I was back on the agenda. But that period then became compounded and complicated by a growing health problem. I’d been diagnosed in 1998, in June 1998, with severe osteoarthritis in my hips. The belief is that it was a growth spurt – this happened down there at Milang when I was fifteen or something – my femur just simply grew too big for the joint, and with a bit of help from just about everything I did in my life it had worn out or was pretty nearly worn out. So I struggled from June 1998 until November 2003, when I finally had the good fortune to have an operation that resurfaced the bones in my hip and gave me a new lease of life. The journey down that few years – I kept working and I kept exhibiting; only the last year did I completely lose the plot, I simply couldn’t sustain myself. I couldn’t get things delivered on time, boxes packed and freight shipped. I’d get halfway through packing a box and, ‘Oh, I just can’t do it. Oh, who cares.’ And I was taking a lot of medication and I didn’t lose the plot but by God I was getting to the point where I simply couldn’t produce sufficient work to survive in the way that I’d become used to. So I dropped down to maybe only twenty works on exhibition around Australia. To truly survive you need closer to a hundred. I was only producing a third to a quarter of what I’d learnt to be a survivable output.

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Anyway, I had the operation and made the recovery and made a good recovery and fairly rapid, and early 2004 I was back in the studio and right back at work. And a lot of things that had been pent-up in me suddenly sort of – you know, I was producing at full, by the middle of last year I was producing at full speed again and I’ve been very productive since then. At the same time the gloom that had descended on the crafts world began to lift and the sun came out and galleries began to open again and interest in ceramics is returning – this year it’s been most noticeable – both nationally and internationally. So things are looking particularly bright at the moment. But there have been some tough patches back (laughs) over the last ten years.

So when you speak in terms of your art, the growth in you slowing down, growth pre-supposes sort of a direction, a getting bigger: is that how you see it in yourself, or is it just one thing one time, another thing another time?

I would think of it now as a growth in understanding. You begin to realise that there are certain things that you used to think were terrifically important that are now just not relevant, and you can’t actually figure out why the hell you thought they were important in the first place, but God, you were so determined about it. You change as you mature in an aesthetic sense, you begin to examine, your eyes begin to see – looking at the landscape – they begin to see things that you didn’t notice were there before with quite the same degree of clarity. Your skills and your command of your medium bring you to a point where you can get hold of that idea and get it into form. You can express yourself with relative ease so that – – –. And the other component, that you acquire an intuitiveness about what you are doing as an artist that gives you a sense of confidence about what you’re doing. There’s less questioning and there’s more certainty in your mind. You recognise that most of the world around you doesn’t have a clue what you’re on about, and that you can rely on society not having very much understanding at all of what you’re rabbiting on about, but on the other hand you begin to understand the nature of things in a rather special way. You begin to see the components of the natural world, the process of time, the feeling you have for the material you work with and you become very fluent with this material, you’ve got a very good understanding of it, and you feel that there are no inhibitions, you’re not trying to prove anything any more, that you’ve earned a kind of a right, you’ve got a kind of a licence to really express your innermost and deeper kind of emotional

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and perhaps even spiritual response to the world that you see around you. The trick with the artistic life is you’ve got to go the distance. It’s a well-known and proven notion in Asian, in Oriental aesthetics, that the true wisdom comes with a long, long working life. Towards the end you really start to do something very important as an artist, you start to break into much more a period of creative freedom and you sort of return on your many years of investment. Some would say it’s like an old plum tree: it blooms its best the year before it dies. (laughs) But if you pay your dues and you put in the hard yards, particularly in a field like ceramics, the doors do open, the doors of understanding open. Your physical capacity is somewhat in decline when all this happens, which is very annoying, but your understanding of things advantages you greatly in the way you can read your world and express it in form.

You suggested that when you came back from Scotland you gave away the potting wheel and you started building, and people said, ‘Ooh, he’s going through a new phase.’ That sort of – – –? Did you lose any support that way, any people? How did the critics react, how have the critics treated you?

The critical world, I’ve had a very interesting time with them over the years. I’ve had very few bad reviews. A couple of times they’ve had a bit of a go at me. (laughs) I’ve always had the ability to be able to deal with that. They’ve never been, unfortunately, in my field particularly gifted or skilled writers: a few over the years, but not many. It has been a problem in getting what we do put into print, it has been a problem getting a good, literate explanation in newspapers and magazines and professional books and so forth of what we do in ceramics and what we’re trying to say. I’ve been careful enough to make sure I’ve kept on their good side and you’ve got to be a bit cunning about all this: you’ve got to make sure that the critic you’re going to have to deal with in any particular city is sort of lined up and given the correct information, and if possible you get to meet with them prior to the exhibition opening if not during, and you talk to them afterwards and you build up a relationship. And that, spread over a number of years, gets to be quite significant. I’ve gained in stronger critical support as I’ve gone along. I had a bit of a hammering at times in the ’80s, but I survived that. (laughs) I got pretty snaky about it at the time.

What was the basis of it?

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Look, at the risk of being crass, I was an easy target. It was, ‘We’ve got to bring this guy down to size.’ It was kind of the ‘tall poppy’ thing, particularly in a small community like South Australia. A critic could get themselves a lot of attention by having a swipe at what appeared to be the Establishment and I appeared to be the one to have a crack at. So that sort of happened. I understood the problem and have since, subsequently, managed it – as well as you can; you just don’t know. What you do learn from your contact with the media and with the critical processes [is] that at the end of the day it doesn’t actually have much meaning. There is a vast history of people that have been dealt with very badly by the critics, been really attacked – it’s almost a guarantee they’re going to turn out to be important, because the critics are writing in one time and the artist is frequently operating in another. I can recall the words from the very first review I ever got that went something like ‘This exhibition is above average for Adelaide’s incestuous and parochial craft clique, but rather limited and boring.’ (laughs) And I can remember well who said it. (laughs) I’ve done better than him. That sort of sums it up rather nicely. But you learn how to manage press releases and basically help them with it. Then there is the thing where you are on time, you’re fashionable, and then you get wonderful reviews and they say glorious things about you, and you make a very serious mistake if you believe a word of it. The chances are they were just as wrong then as when they were [criticising] you. You’ve got to live beyond what happens to you in that particular paradigm, you’ve got to have your own pathway and your own position. And it’s the same with entering prizes and awards, there’s a huge danger that you might win one of those bloody things and the result of this is that you develop, you somewhat enhance, your (laughs) opinion of yourself, or you have it enhanced for you, and that can be very, very disruptive. You survive because you have your own natural critical processes. If you farm it out to others, you’re in strife. If you have to wait for others to tell you whether you’re right or wrong with your work you lose your – the critical facility is as much a part of your working life as being able to make sure you can get a kiln fired. You lose it and you’re lost. It changes with time and develops, too. Sometimes you can be much too harsh a critic of yourself. I’ve got a row of agapanthus up there that are hiding a whole heap of pots that I thought were terrible. ‘Shit, got to get rid of this thing.’ Didn’t have the heart to break it, stuck it out there, agapanthus grew over it, five years later a visiting

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gallery director kicks it with a foot and says, ‘That’s gorgeous, what on earth’s it doing there?’ (laughs) And I said, ‘Yeah, well, it doesn’t look too bad, but I didn’t like it when I put it there!’ So things change. And you’re very concerned with getting on with what’s in front of you. I mean, you desperately need critical evaluation of what you’re doing and where you’re going, but it’s how you let it affect what you do that’s so very important to your survival. I don’t know, you get to a point where I guess whatever they say is not going to affect you very much. On the other hand, sometimes you read things that people say about your work and you think, ‘Now, that’s an interesting slant, I hadn’t actually ever kind of thought about it that way.’ So that’s important too.

A little comment there, speaking about the critics, put it in sort of biblical terms: how can anything good come out of Adelaide?

(laughs)

Two things there. I’ve got a listen question here: how important is Cherryville to you? It’s a long way from the eastern markets, presumably where you’ve probably made lots of your money. So why stay in little ol’ Adelaide?

Well, interstate has produced about ninety per cent of my income for ninety per cent of my working life. First of all, I’m a South Australian. My first ancestor came here, William Mincham, and set himself up first of all down on Hindley Street and had a little business and then he moved up, set up a farm at Echunga. I know where all my ancestors are buried, (laughs) they’re all not far from here. And I think of this as ‘my place’, and a sense of place is terribly important to me as an artist. If I was working in another place I would make very different work. I’ve now reached a stage – I could have moved, perhaps I should have moved; I should have moved in the ’80s, should have moved to America in the ’80s. But there’s something here. I’ve just been interstate, got back, pulled up the car and got out, and the moment my foot hits the ground and I look out across those ridges there’s a mild sort of thrill that goes through me because I know I’m home, I know this is my place. My understanding of everything has started from here. Is it Eliot said, TS Eliot said, ‘Home is where you started from, from where you began,’ and in my work as a potter this is where I began. I’m still very attached to the landscape of my childhood, the lakes in the Coorong, they still have a strong and powerful emotional attachment and it’s nice to know they’re only an hour and a half drive away for me, and I can still drive down

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there, along the Coorong, and see the hummocks there gleaming in the afternoon light and it brings back a wonderful, exciting and somewhat dangerous boyhood. Those things are terribly important to me, they’re the shores and props of my world and my aesthetic understanding, it is my artistic nourishment. I guess I’ve always thought of myself as part of Adelaide. I’ve had ancestors and relatives that have been active in public and community life here in South Australia, I’ve been involved with South Australian organizations that vary from Crafts Councils to the Royal South Australian Society of Art, the Hahndorf Academy, the early days of the Jam Factory. Sometimes all that’s been a burden to me because I felt that it’s held me back; now I’ve got to a stage in my life where I very much enjoy travelling and exhibiting in other places, but my artistic storehouse is here. Well, that’s what I think – I could be wrong about that, perhaps I should test myself more on that.

Different sort of question but in a sense allied to that: you’ve been involved in the local community, even to the extent of being on the local council and Deputy Mayor. How did you get time to do that?

(sighs, laughs) God knows.

Artists are often seen as being apart from their communities.

Yes. I mean that is a stereotypical view that is very, very common and plenty of artists indulge in it. If you look in history there have been plenty of successful artists that have been diplomats, politicians and prominent in public life and all sorts. There was always a bit of a political twist in me. I got involved in local government – I walked in an open door, and I should have been alarmed when I heard it snap shut behind me. I ended up being a deputy mayor on a council and it was very interesting because I was different to the other people sitting around the table and I had a different perspective on things, and sometimes that gave me quite an advantage. The natural processes of what you do to survive as an artist, the way you learn to think and evaluate and estimate and proportion, and that can be very much applied to public life. But since my days as a Boy Scout I’d been a patrol leader, I’d been cursed with this sort of leadership role thing all my life and the Jam Factory experience there – I guess I had grown up with an idea from people, some individuals I had contact with in my very young life, with an idea about responsibility, about

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serving your community, about giving something of yourself to make the world in which you live better. So after my involvement with local government I got involved with the Adelaide Hills Regional Development Board and subsequent to that various other related boards, culminating in Chair of Regional Development South Australia, which is the peak body for the whole regional development framework. And I along the way was involved with the rebuilding of the Hahndorf Academy and served on Country Arts SA for three years, and I developed a certain reputation for being able to make organizations that weren’t working well work a lot better. I’ve fixed my share of wrecks in my time – (aside) that probably came from the Jam Factory experience – but I’ve proved to be very able when an organization is in a bit of crisis, mainly because I can plough in there and make the decisions that have to be made. As I’ve developed my experience with regional development I’ve got a better and more refined and more mature understanding of the political process, shall we say, and I still think that my artistic background gives me an advantage, particularly when you’re talking in terms of strategic planning, big picture thinking, when you’re talking about a sort of conceptual – well, a conceptual understanding, when you’re dealing with complicated abstract concepts; and that’s very much in an artist’s life, you can get your head around all that. The trick is to make other people believe you. My artistic background has been a problem in dealing with state governments and premiers and captains of industry and various other individuals, so I’ve tended to suppress it and I’ve tended to keep – I’ve gradually developed two lives, and I have my artistic life and my public life. I calculatingly keep them apart because people in the artistic world think, ‘Very, very strange for an artist to be mixed up with that sort of thing,’ and people in the political world think, ‘Well, if he’s an artist he must be a bit of a nut and a bit unreliable.’ They’ve often found out, to their cost and sorrow, that is not so. (laughs) Oh, actually I have to say that I often make mention of my artistic background to give me an advantage, because the particular opponent that I’ll be dealing with will make a set of assumptions immediately which will eventually advantage me. (laughs) So I can be quite canny about how I deal with that. I’ve reached a point, however – I have a mission, a strong sense of mission – but my thoughts about public life are four rules: one, do no harm; two, do as much good as you can; three, know when your time’s up; and four, expect no thanks. I think my time’s up, and I will probably over the next six or seven months withdraw from my

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boards – and at this stage there are four of them and I chair two – and return to the relative peace of my studio. The reason being I’m really onto a very rich vein at the moment in my work and I really, with these fabulous new hips, don’t want to waste too much time sitting at meetings. I think I’ve done what I can do in public life, I feel I’ve done as much as I can do. I’m having a bit of trouble getting to the exit sign – you know, people come to depend on you – but the task that I set myself is pretty nearly complete and I think it’s now time for me to get on with my work.

We’ll get back to that in a moment. But we’ve looked at your public, local community life. What have you put into the artistic world in terms of boards and what have you?

Yes. I’ve had a lot of involvement with the crafts organizations from 1979 through to the mid-’80s. I was a bold young man of strong and strident views who chose his words less than wisely far too often, and rubbed the odd – well, I mentioned before we were a very determined group of people very committed professionally, and we were pretty fierce about where we positioned ourselves. And I wanted those organizations to be successful and achieve things and I drove them and people around me pretty hard. I came out of it a bit burned out, I’d have to say. The experience of going back into local government was to take with me all the things that I’d learned during those years and have another go at it, this time – I started with local government in 1993 – this time wiser about the way I would deal with things. I had certainly learned in my involvement with crafts and arts organizations, from sort of ’79 through to ’85, I’d had a good basic grounding in political processes, et cetera. But I was always struck, always having to deal with organizations that were having a certain amount of difficulty that needed strong and forceful leadership – damn it, I provided it and I (laughs) made a few enemies. So by the time I got to local government I’d grown up a heck of a lot and I’d steadied up a lot and I found that there were other ways of getting results than banging people’s heads together: you could persuade them to hit their own heads! (laughs) So I had always a reputation for public speaking skills that would get me by, I had a reputation of being about to find the right word at the right time, and so I did get very involved in that. I didn’t have any great involvement with arts organizations at all during that period until quite recently, strangely enough. I had very little to do with Australia Councils and State Crafts Councils and Jam Factories, I was a complete outsider to them, had

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virtually nothing to do with them. I was still resentful about some of the things that happened in the past, and – damn it all – they weren’t in too much of a hurry to see me back, either. I became involved again with the Hahndorf Academy in Hahndorf, and again a dreadful bloody mess that had to be sorted out: a building in crisis, and I had to bring on board some serious funding and fix the building, so I put four and a half years into fixing the roof and the floors and the plumbing and the architraves and changing the management and rebuilding the thing in terms of its operational base. God, that was a ferocious experience. My involvement with Regional Development helped a lot there: I was able to make the connections, I was able to find the money, leverage the money. You know, I got quite good at bringing together pools of funds to achieve things and helping organizations get a structured, sensible plan and getting on board people with ability that could make good judgments and support the organization. It went very well. I was then appointed to Visions of Australia, which is a federal government agency for funding the touring and exhibitions, and I was appointed to Country Arts SA. I was disappointed in Country Arts SA because I felt that it was under-achieving. I felt – and I grew up in the country, I knew what it was all about – I was annoyed that they weren’t developing the opportunities to form good alliances with other regional operators. I was annoyed that the kind of art that they were succumbing to didn’t represent the kind of thing that I felt that they should be trying to achieve. I was too low down in the organization to be able to change it. There was a certain easygoing laissez-faire thing. Wasn’t me. I thought, ‘I need to move on from here, and one day this organization will be in crisis and I can come back.’ (laughs) In the meantime, the organization Craft Australia that I had been involved in a long time before got itself in one of those crises and I spent eighteen months with a team of four other people sorting out that bloody mess and putting that to rights. That was a very interesting experience, but one that I still question: we made decisions that had to be made, they were hard decisions and some people were hurt. The decisions had to be made; I still grieve and wonder sometimes, ‘Was it the right one?’ And that’s when it’s time in public life, when you start doing that, you’re losing your edge then. Visions of Australia has been wonderful because we fund over sixty per cent of our applications, we have a substantial budget, and you genuinely feel like you’re achieving something. You’re putting these exhibitions on the road, many of which

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wouldn’t otherwise be out there. Australian people are seeing all sorts of stuff, from exhibitions of war memorabilia; postage stamps botanical, historical, artistic; they’re seeing naïve art, Aboriginal art, contemporary art; they’re seeing exhibitions on dinosaurs, exhibitions on cloth and textiles, and they’re moving around Australia because Visions can put them out there, and you feel, you really do feel, like for the effort you’re putting into public life you’re doing something really worthwhile, so I really very much enjoy that. And after all these years it’s been an absolute pleasure, after having to fight all these battles to keep organizations on their feet. Don’t ask me where I got the time: there’s no answer.

That was one of my questions there, but anyway. You make time if you’re – – –.

(laughs) Well, you make the time, you made the time.

So getting back to another comment you made a little while ago, you’re onto a ‘rich vein’ at the moment: what’s the rich vein? Is it something going off in a new direction, a new understanding, or what?

Yes, it’s a new understanding, that’s right. I’ve nutted something out. Again, my relationship with Japanese aesthetic ideologies continues. I’m very much connected to a very ancient set of ideas about pots that really go back to the sixteenth century. And through recent work – and actually this was making tea bowls a couple of years ago – I suddenly started to sort of wake up to the kind of qualities that I could imbue the object with. Now, I’ve gone from a feeling that I can depict the landscape to I can impart its mood, and can frame in ceramics the spirit of the land and the landscape and the things that are going on in it, the process of time, nature, erosion, weathering, changes, changes of season, the growth of trees, the death of trees, the shedding of bark, all the events that are taking place in the landscape. The idea is now that I’m getting my head around the process of being able to bring them into art, and my particular art which is ceramics. And I’m still very much in love with the ceramic process and I do it in form, in vessels, as I always have; but I’m looking for some of the more subtle, sublime and less visible qualities of landscape to be reflected in the work. And the knowledge I have of the Japanese aesthetic approach to ceramics helps me greatly. There’s not much in my own culture that can deal with issues like spontaneity, about things occurring in a haphazard way, about things falling on the forest floor, bark sheeting off of trees and producing spectacular, exquisite visual

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structures. The spontaneous nature of things is not well grasped or understood in our, in Western art form, actually. When it has surfaced strongly it’s caused outrage. But raku taught me to understand it or taught me to work with it and enjoy it and be frustrated by it, and I’m taking now some of those things I learned in my seventeen- odd years in the raku process and in the raku belief system into another range of forms and glazes which are technically an area of glazes that very few people have ever worked in, the mid-fire glazes – not terribly popular, dealt with by amateurs rather badly thirty or forty-odd years ago, producing pretty awful sort of glazes. I’ve found ways to work with them and others haven’t, I’ve got different firing regimes and layering methods and variations of those recipes, and I’m managing through the ceramic process to imbue the object with I think some subtly alluring qualities, and I’m very much excited by it. I reckon I’m onto something here that is giving me a lot of satisfaction and it’s certainly meeting with approval in the public domain, to date.

Couple of sorts of allied questions, developing from that: I suppose to some extent, where you get your inspiration. You’ve suggested you’re almost self-sufficient. Do you take notice of what’s going on around the world? You’ve suggested you get a lot of Japanese influence; what about Middle Eastern or South American or even North American?

True. I certainly had a strong influence on my work, in my student years, on Nigerian ceramics which is virtually unknown. Wonderful, wonderful potters, going back centuries. But yes. I mean, I’ve picked up, have been very fascinated by, other potting approaches; but I guess it turns out that I tend to always see it through my understanding that comes from the Japanese thinking. But certainly, in many cultures you can see wonderfully spirited and free and gloriously expressive pots that have grown naturally and easily from the nature of the material and the skill of the maker, and they have a fabulous charm and I look at them and enjoy them. I don’t know, if I hadn’t developed an understanding of that through my experiences with Japanese ceramics, I don’t know that I would really fully understand it, I can’t be sure about that because I got the Japanese thing first. I very much enjoy the work of other artists that work very, very different from me in other cultures and in other country – and contemporary artists, I’m talking about here – that absorb their own potting traditions and own ceramic cultures and develop their own special, idiosyncratic expression. And I’m thrilled by it and love looking at

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it. It’s never come back into my work – not consciously, anyway – but I get a great personal satisfaction. I’ve judged many awards and prizes over the years and I think in that respect you learn to be able to evaluate things very different from yourself and perceive the qualities that others are achieving using very different methodologies to your own. I love the whole world of ceramics. I collect all kinds of pots, some because I love the way they look and feel, others because I understand technically what’s going on there, some because they represent a set of ideas that I don’t use but I know them, I’m fascinated by them – you know, there might be Chinese brushwork that fascinates me; it might be wonderful rich copper reds or sang de boeufs3 that have been – – –. There’s not much in ceramics I can’t take to or have an empathy for.

END OF DISK 2: DISK 3

This is Peter Donovan speaking with potter, Jeff Mincham, at his home on Tuesday, 20th September 2005. This is tape number 3.

Just a little issue that just occurred to me, talking about your Japanese experience. It all seems to have been second-hand: was it a genuine Japanese experience, did you not wish to go and find out for yourself?

Yes. Now, in my student days the fashion was to go to Japan and apprentice yourself or get into a studio or do something and work with a Japanese potter. Now, at that time I chose not to that. I had a lot of contact with Japanese potters and I worked, I had a very pleasant time working with Shiga Shigeo here in Australia for a time. He came here to South Australia and demonstrated and worked, and I worked with him as his assistant and I very much enjoyed it and got a lot out of it and learnt a lot from him. I chose not to go and do the Japanese thing because I felt that I would lose myself culturally. I’d seen others do it and they came back overwhelmed by it, and couldn’t ever – I thought of myself as an Australian potter, and while there was a lot of information there I did not want to become an Australian Japanese potter. Many Australians and Americans and English that have gone and done that have ended up being so overwhelmed by the Japanese potting experience – and it’s pretty disciplined, very fierce – that they never really, their own artistic impulses are really

3 Sang de boeuf, literally ‘oxblood’, by which name the dark red glaze is also known.

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suppressed by the system and they make and work in a very, very specific style and tend never to step beyond it, as though anything else is unconscionable. I didn’t want to lose my Australianness. I wanted to know what they did, I was fascinated by their techniques. I picked up a lot from English ceramics – oddly enough, that’s often been connected back to Korean, Chinese and Japanese ceramic ideas as well – but that was really a decision I made some time ago and I still hold with that position, that getting these ideas the way I have – – –. And whenever I get lost I can go back here and find a starting point again, whenever I’ve got myself very confused about what’s good, bad and indifferent in what I’m doing, I can draw from it. The Japan I really want to go to doesn’t exist, it ended four hundred years ago. The Japanese ceramic Post-War tradition that exists intrigues me and I have met many of the individuals in it and enjoyed picking up ideas from people like Nakasato- san, who’s the living treasure of Shigaraki, and he gave me a tool, a specific tool, in 1982 which I still use and treasure: those are the kind of connections that work for me. I chose never to go to Japan and work in the Japanese studio, in that system.

Looking around in Australia, are there any contemporary potters you admire? If so, why? How do they differ, or does their work differ, from yours, and how?

The ones that I do have a long personal relationship with are the people like Greg Daly, whose work differs drastically from mine – we are in a potting sense nothing alike. His work is bright, shiny, it makes a very strong, glossy surface, it’s fabulous glazes, beautiful colours and he works in a very different approach to myself. An old friend of many, many years’ standing is Jenny Orchard, who works in a Funk sort of style – it’s not a very correct way of saying it – but she has developed her own curious ceramic iconography, very amusing and very charming, and joyously weird and rather wonderful. I’ve got a great professional respect for people like Pippin Drysdale and the work that she’s doing, very beautiful surfaces that she’s developing. Her work is made by a thrower that she employs and she finishes it – very different approach to mine. I’m into the material and I find my way that way; the sort of more ‘cerebral’ approach comes, I suppose, from Pippin. There are some prominent Australian wood-firers that I greatly admire, people like Chester Nealy and Bill Samuels and Owen Rye. I still, of course, admire very much the work of Les Blakeborough, the work he’s doing. I’ve got other longstanding acquaintances and

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colleagues: Victor Greenaway’s exquisitely-thrown work. There are quite a large number of other potting colleagues out there whose work I have enormous admiration for, very unlike mine, but I enjoy their work and I enjoy their company and there is a kind of rough and ready camaraderie amongst all of us, particularly those of us that have operated for a while on the international world and become internationally somewhat emblematic of what’s going on in Australian ceramics.

Do you get together as a group from time to time?

Yes, occasionally. I’ve stopped doing that, I’ve sort of fallen away from that, but there are national conferences, there are national events that occur that you can attend, and one way or the other we all do trip over each other in our professional lives: we’re exhibiting in the same place or we end up doing workshops together and demonstrations together with organizations like the Victorian Ceramic Group, and there is a National Ceramics Conference which we go to. So we do get to sort of see each other. We go in Gold Coast Ceramic Art Awards and my professional peer group is all there on display with me due to the judges’ excellent selection. (laughs) And we have competed with each other, I suppose; we’re jealous of others’ success; now as you go along and you sort of think – oh, you know, you’ve become survivors in a way so you sort of now support each other and you’re thrilled when a person whose work you have a lot of regard for has a great success. And it’s a good, supportive framework. Very varied, very varied in individual nature and technical approach, but it’s one of the really terrific things about the Australian ceramics world that’s grown up over the years. We were fiercely competitive twenty years ago; now we’ve all made a bit of room for each other, we all support each other and we’d go to the ends of the earth to help each other if it was asked of us.

Do you have any protégés? Is there such a thing as a Mincham School of ceramics?

(laughs) Ah well, there’s plenty of time for that! There have been people at various times that have been greatly influenced by my work and worked somewhat, stylistically, near me. So there have been on occasions comments made that there’s a little group of Minchamites out there producing work. When I would do something that was very different and radical people would pick up on it and do it differently – sometimes even better – and so that has occurred. I feel a sense of responsibility to

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support those coming up – the ‘emerging’ artists, as they’re called – I have a sense of responsibility to support and help and give people a leg up if I can, (door closes) particularly if I see that they have a high degree of commitment and dedication and they’re very, very determined and they’ve got that sort of look in the eye, I feel I need to do something special to help them along and I do when the opportunity arises. Unfortunately, because I don’t have a permanent teaching position, I don’t have that group of students that I’ve had contact with over twenty-odd years that surround people that have had long-term teaching jobs; I’ve tended to sort of move through on a contract basis and so forth. But you know, I was talking just a couple of days ago to a group of very young potters starting out, ceramicists starting out on their pathway, and I rather enjoyed the experience because I thought, ‘Well, they’ve had a couple of things happen to them that have left them feeling a bit confused, and I can say, “Well, this is how I coped with it, this is what I learned,”’ and it was a beaut conversation, actually. (laughs) Don’t know if they listened.

Have you ever had apprentices up in your studio, or – – –?

No, never worked on that basis, only ever at – – –. No, I’ve never had – I’m just too idiosyncratic, anyone working around me would go stark raving mad in a week. I’ve just never had that sort of working relationship, which is a common enough feature of the ceramic world – in fact, very common. Surprisingly, you know. Still, that may change. I don’t know, that might happen; as I get older and weaker I might need someone to lift and carry.

Does daughter Claire have any penchant for pottery?

Yes, she has a great creative streak in her. But she has a very literate mind, a very sharp mind indeed, and she’s applying herself to the study of Classics at the moment and loving it. She’s done some things in ceramics and decorated some bowls and done some things. I don’t know, let’s wait and see on that one. I don’t think that she will go down – she might end up in the curatorial world as one of the thinkers and writers and proselytisers of the notions of art, that wouldn’t surprise me; practitioner, don’t think so. Loves to do creative work and creative things, enjoys that a lot, but I don’t think that she’ll go down the – – –. Probably after what she’s been exposed to for twenty years she won’t go down that path.

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After this ‘rich vein’, anything just niggling there that you’re putting aside at the moment that you’ll do once you’ve done this?

Yes, there is a stronger sculptural thing in my work that has been on hold for quite a while. The work I’m doing at the moment, it’s very much preoccupying me; but there is something else that is on hold and it’s working in a very sculptural way with probably assembled forms and on probably quite a large scale again, and probably in a somewhat architectural context. I’ve had goes at it, I’ve come close, I’ve done a bit of work – there’s some out there – and it’s sort of simmering away. I’m certainly in the back of my mind collecting, but at the moment I’ve got this other thing going which has got me very excited, so there is sort of this sculptural bent which is likely to resurface.

How long can you keep going? What’s the average age of a potter? What is their use-by date?

(laughs) Well, actually, Harold Hughan made it into his nineties, Milton must be seventy-nine, Les must be coming up for seventy-seven. They do tend to die at a great age. My approach to that is quite simple: die in your studio. There is no more fitting place for a conclusion than at the workbench. (laughs) Full bore and full stop, that’s the arrangement. I don’t think the creative lights go. I think the physical capacity might get away from you, but as long as you can just keep putting things in a kiln and hoping like hell that something wonderful’s going to come out, you should stay right with it. So if I do go to the old folk’s home I’ll take my kiln with me. (laughs) No, I want to work right up to the finish.

I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head there, Jeff. Anything you want to say as a – – –?

I don’t think there’s anything else I can say. It’s been a very comprehensive conversation we’ve had and I’m thoroughly exhausted.

We haven’t really treated different phases and criticisms or descriptions of your art, but I guess other people can read books about that.

Yes. I guess there are some themes that, as time goes by, might emerge as important to the national understanding of what’s gone on, for instance, in say the development of the crafts world and the events that took place and who was who and what happened. The history of the Jam Factory is one of these days going to have to be

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written, I’ll enjoy that. Yes, being a survivor has its responsibilities. But I could illuminate and think in more detail about some of the specific epochs that I’ve been part of, but I still, I’ve got that idea that the best pot I’ll ever make in my life is the next one and I haven’t until recently done much reflecting. But thank you, I’ve enjoyed this.

Possibly just another couple of issues: have you got any favourite pieces? Have you got something that, ‘Ah, that was a fantastic thing’ that’s in Government House in Canberra, or – – –?

Yes. Well, there is a very beautiful jar, raku jar, I made in 1982 that is in the Western Australian Art Gallery. It’s a round form with white crackle glazes and breaks of black, flashes of red and yellow – a gorgeous piece, that one, absolutely gorgeous piece. There is a very large vessel, also in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, called ‘Nami Kumo’, that was a stand-alone piece that endures the test of time, when I go there I quite enjoy seeing it. There’s an interesting group of five vessels in the Art Gallery in South Australia that I made that I could never do it again, but there it is, I still quite enjoy it. The Newcastle Art Gallery has got an interesting piece, a so- called ‘geomorphic’ form. The National Gallery of Victoria has got a couple of fumed pieces that I made in the middle 1980s that stand the test of time very well: I look at them and think, ‘God, I can’t believe I ever made it.’ So those are – yes, there are a few pieces around like that. I haven’t sort of thought about that much.

One more question leading off from that: when you say there’s this beaut piece in Western Australia – now, you’ll obviously plan something like that, but how much is it just a fluke because of the temperature, the material you’ve got, the way the glaze has taken?

I have formally to confess it’s in the nature of raku, it happened, it just happened. As soon as I saw it in the kiln I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to work,’ and when I got it out of the reduction bin I thought, ‘My God!’ When I saw it in the exhibition and now, when I see it in the gallery – – –. It was just a sublime outcome, everything was in the right place. I moved on from that work and didn’t do much more like that ever again, but it was just a perfect resolution and that’s what this – my approach is very much like that. There are these spectacular resolutions that occur. You had a hand in it, you were there. (laughs) But control? Too much to ask, too bloody boring. You’ve got to – it would take all the excitement out. But when something – you’ve

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got to have your wits about you and understand a unique thing’s happened and know it when it did, and don’t frustrate too much about the fact that it doesn’t happen for a long time again. (laughs) But just glorious things do happen. Keeps you going.

So when was the last major experience you had when you brought something out of the kiln? Does it happen once a month, once every two years?

Well, h’mm. Producing the work for the recent exhibition at ..... Gallery in Sydney, opened on 8th September, I had two pieces there in that show that I swung the kiln door open and went – gasp! – you know, ‘Bloody hell!’ I think I will always acknowledge that they were just stunningly successful pieces. Yes, look, let’s say in a body of thirty works – don’t worry about the time, it might take six months to produce them – there will be three or four pieces in there that will be gaspers, you know, that will just absolutely happen. It is true, however, that sometimes you come back years later and you’ve overlooked something. All the pressure and the emotional drive of an exhibition you’re often not quite yourself. And there has been the occasion where I’ve been expecting something, it hasn’t happened: ‘Oh, no! Damn it!’ And you’d take it out, push it off down the studio, ..... ‘Bugger that thing!’ And you’d come back a week later, or walk in the studio and Lexie says, ‘That’s beautiful!’ ‘No, that’s a heap of shit, it didn’t do what I meant it to.’ ‘That’s beautiful, what are you talking about?’ ‘Oh, yeah, all right.’ You put it in the exhibition, they put the lights on and you stand around and have a glass of wine and think, ‘God damn it, it’s beautiful!’ (laughs) So that’s very much the game of it: sometimes things can occur out of context, too. You’ve set yourself a pathway, you’ve got a set of ideas and then something else starts happening and you’re not recognising the outcome for a while. But on the other hand there are some breathtaking moments when you’re roaring down to the house holding it in your hands and it’s too hot and you’re juggling it saying, ‘Look at this!’ (laughs) No, well, that’s the way I work, I’m afraid.

That’s terrific, and that’s I think made the interview terrific. Thanks very much there, Jeff.

A pleasure.

END OF INTERVIEW.

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